Abu Qatada

Omar Mahmoud Othman (1960-), also known as Abu Qatada, was a Palestinian Sunni Muslim scholar of Islam who was a recruiter for al-Qaeda.

Biography
Omar Mahmoud Othman was born in 1960 in Bethlehem, West Bank, which was occupied by Jordan at the time. In 1989 he became a professor of sharia sciences at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he met Osama bin Laden. After the 1991 Gulf War he was exiled from Kuwait, and he later travelled to the United Kingdom on asylum in 1994, claiming that he was tortured in Jordan and using a forged United Arab Emirates passport. Around that time, he had a pro-Armed Islamic Group (GIA) weekly magazine at the time of the Algerian Civil War, and he became a preacher in England. In 1995, he issued a fatwa justifying the killing of all apostates from Islam in Algeria, and in 1997 he called on Muslims to kill the wives and children of Egyptian officers. In 1999, he made his most important speech when he called for American citizens to be attacked wherever they were, and saying that they were the same as Jews and the English. On 14 September 2001 he described 9/11 as a battle of the continuing fight between Islam and Christianity, glorifying the attacks in a 2002 poem and he declared that it was not a sin to kill a non-Muslim for the sake of Islam. In October 2002, he was arrested in South London, but on 13 February 2012 he was released under restrictions. On 17 April he was rearrested after deportation to Jordan became a possibility, and in 2013 he was deported. On 24 September 2014 he was released after being found not guilty for taking part in a 1998 bombing campaign, and in July 2015 he appeared in an al-Nusra Front video condemning Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi for committing atrocities against Muslims, although he agreed with their anti-United States sentiment.